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AerynOS is a Linux distribution built from scratch that has atomic updates, blazing-fast performance, and industry-leading reliability.
The Live Installer, that can be downloaded bellow, uses lichen a custom built CLI software to install and configure AerynOS. The following desktop environment are present in the AerynOS repos:
AerynOS brings live atomic updates that apply instantly, while ensuring that the system stays protected through atomic rollbacks in case anything goes wrong. There's no need to reboot the whole system for every little changes.
The atomic update is in fact a series of changes to a system that are treated as a single, indivisible operation. Every operation must complete, otherwise the entire update is cancelled with all prior parts of the incomplete update being rolled back to its original state.
In AerynOS, Atomic updates are managed by its package manager moss . Packages are packaged up as bespoke .stone moss-format files. These .stone files contain a deduplicated set of hashed files compressed using zstd. When a .stone file is installed via moss, the files are decompressed and stored into a global, deduplicated content addressable store under /.moss/.
In the last stage of an atomic update, moss creates a new /usr directory that uses hardlinks to the latest packages and uses the renameat2 Linux kernel syscall with the RENAME_EXCHANGE flag to swap the new and old /usr in an atomic transaction.
It's important to note that hardlinks have a tiny footprint and minimize the disk space and copy operations. This allows for retaining system snapshots with minimal overhead and provides the ability to perform atomic rollbacks to earlier states so long as the user does not prune those.
As part of the boot management solution, every moss transaction ID is encoded into the kernel command line and is applied during early boot into our initramfs, before the /sysroot is reached.
Every kernel is correctly synchronized with the right rootfs based on the moss transaction to which it was associated.
Since every transaction creates a new bootloader entry, AerynOS automatically prunes all but the last 5 transactions from the bootloader list (in order to keep it manageable).
This comes useful when a critical package would be (accidentally or intentionally) removed breaking the stability of the system.
In AerynOS, you can enter the bootloader (by mashing your spacebar) on reboot. Once inside the bootloader, you then select the second to last entry and this will automatically switch to the /usr filesystem transaction where the critical package had not yet been deleted.
However, this process can even happen automatically as upon trying to boot into a faulty transaction, the system will discover that there is an issue with the transaction and will atomically roll back to the prior bootloader entry with the associated correct /usr directory that works. This rollback process only takes at most a couple seconds and will automatically bring the user back into a live working AerynOS system.
New Feature: Hybrid Torrents
Hybrid torrents support the BitTorrent V1 and V2 protocol. Its support is not well spread out yet so we recommend that you still use v1 (aka the "torrent" column).
